The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Elizabeth Kolbert
Thursday, 03 Apr 2014 at 8:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker, an award-winning environmental journalist, and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, and introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction. Part of the World Affairs Series and the Wildness, Wilderness & the Environmental Imagination Series.The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.
In The Sixth Extinction, two-time winner of the National Magazine Award and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of scores of researchers in half a dozen disciplines, accompanying many of them into the field: geologists who study deep ocean cores, botanists who follow the tree line as it climbs up the Andes, marine biologists who dive off the Great Barrier Reef. She introduces us to a dozen species, some already gone, others facing extinction, including the Panamian golden frog, staghorn coral, the great auk, and the Sumatran rhino. Through these stories, Kolbert provides a moving account of the disappearances occurring all around us and traces the evolution of extinction as concept, from its first articulation by Georges Cuvier in revolutionary Paris up through the present day. The sixth extinction is likely to be mankind's most lasting legacy; as Kolbert observes, it compels us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
Photo credit: Nicholas Whitman
Cosponsored By:
- LAS Miller Lecture Funds
- MFA Program in Writing & the Environment
- World Affairs
- Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)
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